Creative Cooking

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

The setup is: you are an elf (right? Those guys again…) whose goal is to prepare dinner for their friends. You need some missing ingredients, find 'em! ‘Save the world’ is overrated as a plot motivation, no?

This is a translated work, and there are some glitches to be sure. I took it on myself to note them in my transcript, but started second guessing myself halfway through. Where is the line between ‘robotic adherence to Funk and Wagnalls’ and ‘interesting new language rhythms’? I’m sure not the one to pinpoint that inflection point, but this work actively made me question it.

You know those guys that play doctors on TV, then proceed to give medical advice? My stolen authority is, I’m married to an amateur baker and I’m going to give a baking metaphor. One that will convince you ‘this guy has no idea what baking even is. Maybe should be restrained from entering a kitchen.’

As a game it feels weirdly underBAKED (ah? ah? yah, I did that) with spots of ‘baked to perfection’ inside. Normal cakes bake and the outside firms up first, but you need a toothpick test to determine if the inside is done. Well, this is like a cake that somehow bakes itself inside out! The outside framework is still a bit gooey and loose, but inside there are pockets of firm, fluffy resolution. You wake up in a lab and explore your way through a pretty empty house until finding the kitchen… where the game begins. (In my case 40 MINUTES INTO GAMEPLAY.) So many unimplemented nouns and a slow build setting. The first object I could even examine closely was a toilet pot, and lemme tell you the mental dance my character did on approach was UN. SETTLING. It was a half hour before it was clear I was in a fantasy setting! (Longer before I realized I was an ELF ptoo, ptoo.) You can imagine when one of the first details was ‘I sometimes pee in my backyard,’ how weird THAT came off! Honestly I’m not sure it got any better once I was an elf.

Then, you eventually stumble into the library and a whole tapestry of setting and backstory unfolds before you, liberally peppered with ‘gonna throw fantasy words at you and you’re just gonna have to context your way through.’ I actually really like that approach. In IF, without some careful mood setting, it always strikes me a bit off when the characters explain something they already know for the benefit of the player. Here it comes across as tantalizing world building we don’t completely understand. This is how tantalizing works! If we understood it we’d have a different response: admiration or disappointment. It seems this background is part of a shared world the author intends to flesh out in subsequent works. The glimpses here make a convincing case to keep watching. The world building was the most firm part of this weird, inside-out cake I’m describing, and where most of the text is devoted.

The gooey outside is the gameplay. I mentioned the unimplemented nouns, that are practically ubiquitous. Weirdly ‘UP’ is listed as an exit in every location, but the messaging says, ‘no, don’t try that.’ I can only assume there was a levitation mechanism at play early on that got cut? At least one outdoor location mentions a roof when it rejects you, but maybe the whole thing just should have been trimmed. The puzzles are pretty unchallenging ‘find the stuff,’ most of it laying around or minimal-step sub-questable. One item needs to be marinated in a pond, but the game rejects (Spoiler - click to show) >PUT or >DROP and only accepts (Spoiler - click to show) >THROW . As you go, you get occasional tantalizing backstory details - NPCs you don’t really interact with but have rich things to say; descriptions of the town. Still some baked nuggets in the goo!

So far, flashes of engaging background in a pretty Mechanical experience, right? Well, I haven’t yet mentioned my favorite touch in this game. The HELP system doubles as the author’s DVD-like location-bound commentary track. I resisted initially because I didn’t want spoilers. When it became clear I was walking through a minimally implemented set of rooms, I broke the seal. The author’s voice here is frank and engaging and shot through with the uncertain grasping of a creator struggling with details in service of a goal. That was charming and irresistible, not least of which because it so precisely captured the creative tradeoff process with all its uncertainty, dread and regret. I mean, I’ve felt all of those things in projects of my own ALL THE TIME. In some ways the commentary was more compelling than the underlying game!

What do I do with this physically impossible cake? Between the commentary and the tantalizing background it generated Sparks. Yeah, when cakes are generating sparks I have lost all control over the metaphor. Intrusively under-implemented. Stealth launchpad for the game to follow!

Played: 11/4/23
Playtime: 1.25hr, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Intrusively under-implemented
Would Play After Comp?: No, but I look forward to seeing the next game in this universe. Which maybe was the point of the thing?

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless